Sunday, March 18, 2012

And the war drags on . . .

A new killing campaign is convulsing Iraq. The express targets are "emos", short for "emotional": a western-derived identity, teenagers adopting a pose of vulnerability, along with tight clothes and skewed hairdos and body piercing. Starting last year, mosques and the media both began raising the alarm about youthful immorality, calling the emos deviants and devil worshippers. In early February, somebody began killing people. The net was wide, definitions inexact. Men who seemed effeminate, girls with tattoos or peculiar jewellery, boys with long hair, could all be swept up. The killers like to smash their victims' heads with concrete blocks.There is no way to tell how many have died: estimates range from a few dozen to more than 100. Nor is it clear who is responsible. Many of the killings happened in east Baghdad, stronghold of Shia militias such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army and Asaib Ahl al-Haq (the League of the Righteous). Neither, though, has claimed responsibility. Iraq's brutal interior ministry issued two statements in February. The first announced official approval to "eliminate" the "satanists". The second, on 29 February, proclaimed a "campaign" to start with a crackdown on stores selling emo fashion. The loaded language suggests, at a minimum, that the ministry incited violence. It's highly possible that some police, in a force riddled with militia members, participated in the murders.It's logical to compare this to the militia campaign against homosexual conduct in 2009, which I documented for Human Rights Watch. Hundreds of men lost their lives then. Gay-identified men have been caught up in these killings as well, and Baghdad's LGBT community is rife with fear. Yet there are differences. The current killings target women as well as men, and children are the preferred victims. It's not quite true to say, as some press reports have suggested, that "emo" is just a synonym for "gay" in Iraq. Rather, immorality, western influence, decadence and blasphemy have come together in a loosely defined, poorly aligned complex of associations: and emo fashion and "sexual perversion" are part of the mix.

There is more to the statement but let's stay on the topic of statements to jump over to Huffington Post where they post two paragraphs and maintain that's a statement from the State Dept. Those two paragraphs are part of the four paragraph statement we ran in yesterday's snapshot. Maybe we should have included the title to the statement? "U.S. Embassy Condemns Attacks on 'Emo' Youth In Iraq." Use the link, you'll be taken to the US Embassy in Baghdad's website. From the title alone, you should be able to grasp -- even if you write for the Huffington Post -- that this is a statement not from the State Dept but from the US Embassy in Baghdad. It's a real shame Huffington Post can't stick to the facts or even do a basic fact check. As we noted yesterday of Hillary's 'quote' in the statement -- she's not speaking of Iraqi youths, it's from a speech she gave at the start of December.

If you have something to add to the above, feel free. But don't offer your fact-free e-mails because I'm not in the mood.

Here's a little game we can play: Where's the press release?

We'll make it even easier to play this version of Where's Waldo, here's all the above but in links:

There was NO press release. That State Dept did nothing in 2009 and they're doing less right now. They've taken the statement issued by the US Embassy in Baghdad and sent that to the Huffington Post (sent two paragraphs of it) and the Huffington Post was stupid enough to fall for it.

When the State Dept issues a press release, boys and girls, you'll always find it on the State Dept's website. True under Bully Boy Bush, true under Barack. No press release was issued.

Think about the time it took for the State Dept to figure out how to respond to the Huffington Post article and grasp that instead of addressing the issue, they decided to lie and pretend they had.

That probably took them longer than issuing a statement.

But they'd rather do that and that says a great deal.

Just more blood-letting and misery and tearsThat this poor country's known for the last twenty years,And the war drags on.-- words and lyrics by Mick Softly (available on Donovan's Fairytale)Last Sunday, the number of US military people killed in the Iraq War since the start of the illegal war was 4487. Tonight? PDF format warning, DoD lists the the number of Americans killed serving in Iraq at 4488.

About Me

We do not open attachments. Stop e-mailing them. Threats and abusive e-mail are not covered by any privacy rule. This isn't to the reporters at a certain paper (keep 'em coming, they are funny). This is for the likes of failed comics who think they can threaten via e-mails and then whine, "E-mails are supposed to be private." E-mail threats will be turned over to the FBI and they will be noted here with the names and anything I feel like quoting.
This also applies to anyone writing to complain about a friend of mine. That's not why the public account exists.